Can we move away from third party mass emailing services?

Workspaces Software (General)
1

Hi everyone,

Turning to the people in this group, I would like to ask what options are there to move away from free marketing services when sending newsletters to the community? Currently we’re on mailchimp, but what would it take to set up a mailing list onto our server and better protect the privacy of individual Edgeryders? After our last email blast I got this feedback, in all good intentions, and i think this person has a point:

"all your links are converted to these spying links like:

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=2426561089e1f5ab32da252cd&id=9871d9d336&e=35bff7b29c

which point probably to some http://edgryders.eu url. you can see above,

there’s a ?u=<number> - that actually tracks each recipient distinctly.

instead use your own mailserver or that of some friendly and trusted local

organisation. donate some money to the local hackerspace or something, and

build trust and friendship with them. maybe some of the edgeryders have spare

capacities themselves.

if you want to use the internet for doing positive change, you cannot expose

your network like that to the world. if you ever become successful -

threatening to corruption, incompetence, ignorance and malice, you will have

powerful adversaries who will gladly use your lack of operational security

this against you.

on a side-note, from a european privacy regulation point of view, i could ask

you to inform me about your data handling practices regarding my private data.

and as such your disclosure of my email address to a foreign 3rd party without

my explicit consent is a violation of privacy laws in all eu countries. i

could ask you to delete this data, and you would not be able to comply."

2

let’s look for alternatives …

I’m waiting for this https://www.mailpile.is/

possibly it could adress all of these issues 

what can we use for now ?

(for some people it’s also not easy to switch , as it’s some effort to learn “new” open source software, but I think we should try to find some alternatives as well )

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3

Not a mailinglist.

As great as MailPile is, from my current understanding it is a web-based e-mail client. So an alternative to GMail. It is not a mailing list manager like Mailchimp.

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4

I couldnt let go so I looked for self hosted alternatives

to mailchimp. This looks promising http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/03/this-self-hosted-newsletter-app-is-100x-cheaper-than-mailchimp-and-campaign-monitor/#disqus_thread

What do you guys think? [Noemi]?

5

looks good to me

Plus the dashboard seems easy to navigate. thanks for keeping the issue in mind :slight_smile:

If somebody okays the requirements we can give it a try. “Sendy is a self hosted application that runs on PHP & MySQL. Pay once and it’s yours, there’s no recurring fee. What are the requirements? You need an Apache server running a Unix like operating system (eg. Linux) with PHP & MySQL support. Almost all hosting companies support them.”

6

Good

I made a quick evaluation and it seem to me really a valid product (maybe less rich of features then MailChimp but good enough).

7

Ok!

This would be great. If someone is up for helping us set this up and manage it, we could then offer community members the option of using our self-hosted alternative later down the line and offering it as a paid service to the organisations they work with/for. I don’t know if it would be any cheaper than Mailchimp, but if we then dump gmail and the like for Smari’s Mailpile and encourage the community members to do the same it would certainly be a lot more secure.

Emanuele are you up for helping set it up? If so maybe ping [Matthias] to coordinate?

8

The other issue is metrics

in order to know who we have emailed, when which links have been clicked in etc helps us get better at communication, not spam people etc. As everything we do requires input of time and effort, so we need to ensure we are not wasting our or other people’s time. And its difficult to gauge if you are getting btter or not without metrics…

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9

Agree.

Let’s find us a newsletter system that is integrated into Drupal, using a Drupal module.

Metrics are still possible, but the tracker links would then also be edgeryders.eu links, indicating to people that no third party is going to have that kind of data. But we have to see if we can find an open source system that includes these metrics.

About the European privacy regulation side note, I think legally we should be safe due to the so-called safe harbour agreement between Europe and the U.S., allowing to process data from European citizens there. And Mailchimp is probably considered hosting services / data processing, not a third party to whom data is handed over.

But the guy or gal is certainly right that it should be forbidden from a European privacy regulation standpoint: after all this NSA blowup, that Safe Harbour agreement is just farce, and still they did not want to cancel it …

10

Tricky

This is not an easy thing to attack. If edgeRyders wants a good solution to this problem, it will take a LOT of effort. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try - just be prepared for a lot of work.

I’ll list the possible solutions that come to my mind:

  1. Expand what you got.

This is probably the quickest thing, but actually in terms of developer time/effort it’s as much work as setting up option 2. It’s easier cos users won’t have to learn much new stuff.

Cons:

It would take a very long time to get the same features in option 2 (years of dev time).

It’s much harder to scale, and uses more server CPU time.

  1. Move entriely to email lists + a simple wiki and etherpad. This would probably be the solution I would recommend.

Pros:

I’d say email lists are light years ahead of any web based forum software. The reason for this is that they’ve had more time to mature. With lists everyone is using a dedicated client on their local machine (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird).

This gives you a better user experience because the software is running on your machine.

It gives you better search and organisation feature than you’ll get on any web based thing.

It reduces the work done by the servers, because they only have to deal with backend stuff. This makes it by far the cheapest and easiest to scale.

It makes things like remote backup very easy.

It can be setup to be very secure with very little effort. (e.g. Encryption).

Cons:

People would have to learn new tools. This applies to some degree with any change. But people might see learning to use thunderbird as more daunting then learning to use new website features. I’d actually agrue that it isn’t. IF people are willing to read a page or two of text, and spend a small amount of time experimenting, most people could become fairly confident with thunderbird in 30 minutes. Then they’ll be able to use it to communicate, and pick up the more advanced features as and when they need them.

There are some feautures I’d like that I can’t think of an elegant way to do on lists. However, the only way to get them is option 4.

  1. Look at trying to get some commercial software pro bono. Sharepoint/Huddle? I guess you can’t afford to pay for it, so you’d need to get one of those big software companies to sponsor edgeRyers.

  2. Completely rebuild the platform from scratch. Massive project. Long term, yes, I hope. But it will take years.

Oh, and if you’re paranoid about security/NSA, get a server in Iceland.

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11

Where is the bargain?

I’m an IT professional from longtime, and I think that privacy is important. But I think that the alarm on the privacy, after NSA disclosure, is bringing many people in a paranoic or ideological point of view.

I’m conscious that using the social networks, I expose myself to the public view. Many data about myself become available for everybody, not only friends to wich that data are addressed, but also many company that make profit with marketing business. (And also to NSA. But I have nothing to hide, I’m not a secret agent. My cospiracy is by the light of the sun.)  

MailChimp give for free a good tool with usability and metrics at state of the art. Sould we renounce to that benefits? What we will earn in exchange? Building this kind of services is not easy at all, and have a high cost in term of human resources.

If a person dont accept MailChimp, she should not use facebook, twitter, google mail/plus/groups/drive, dropbox etc… In a single word, that person should stay out of the internet social world.

I’m also a fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe from years, and I think that we, everybody, should reward Richard Stallman for the GPL licence that started all this. But very few non-technical people in the world know that he is the father of this revolution. Why? Because he is too much radical. This is a price too high for the edgeryders, IMHO.

12

Thanks for all your thoughts

Very much appreciated! So it seems what we have so far, here and from discussions spread on facebook (sic!) is:

  1. mixed opinions as to whether we should or not even bother with deploying such an alternative tool. Actually the title of my post should’ve been “Should we move away…?” instead of “can”, because the way I see it, the first is the most important question at this point. I was also curious to see if many others agree with that feedback or not. no hard hitting consensus then. Perhaps I should simply email specific people separately as I learn about their strong preference.

  2. the general agreement from developers is that it would take a lot of effort to establish a healthy system ourselves/ hosted on our server if i understand it correctly.

  3. an offer from [Matthias] to look into what Drupal has to offer.

I’ve yet to understand [phm]'s suggestion to move onto “email lists + a simple wiki and etherpad”, namely what that involves, practically.  Does it mean everyone having an edgeryders.eu email and an interface to communicate via a mailinglist?

For what it’s worth, [Emanuele Cisbani] everything you wrote reasonates perfectly with me personally, that’s exactly how i relate to privacy “I’ve nothing to hide and I pay a little bit extra attention at what I share online and in curating my profiles”. However I’m trying to disassociate and think in terms of community health and keeping everyone happy, or as many as possible - hence the post :slight_smile: 

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13

I agree

Your summary is perfect. I agree also to “think in terms of community health and keeping everyone happy, or as many as possible”. Any possibility has to be evaluated.

:slight_smile:

14

lists

“Does it mean everyone having an edgeryders.eu email and an interface to communicate via a mailinglist?”

No. They could use Googlemail, for example. But they probably need to understand how to use googlemail to sort messages into different folders. Otherwise they’ll have a lot of stuff in their inbox (which is probably undesirable).

15

Those who do the work call the shots.

[Noemi] and all, whomever feels this strongly about one or another change from the status quo would be more credible if they were willing to put in the work of building the alternative. There will always be a zillion things we could do better but this requires everyone pulling their weight to make them happen. So my suggestion would be getting back to the person or people in question and asking them if they would be willing to do the work they proposed. If not, we just move on imho.

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